Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

The historian Barbara Fields and her sister, the sociologist Karen
Fields, openRacecraft, their collection of linked essays, by denying
that there are such things as races. Race today does not, they point
out, refer to ‘a traditionally named group of people’ but to ‘a
statistically defined population’. So, for example, the determining
factor in susceptibility to sickle cell anaemia, long thought of as a
‘black disease’, is whether you have ancestors from sub-Saharan
Africa, which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some
of the people we think of as white do. So, too, the relevant genetic
information about a person is individual and familial, not racial. A
person’s height, for example is determined mainly by the height of his
or her actual ancestors, partly by environmental factors and not at
all by the statistical entity that counts as his or her race. Thus,
against developments like the growing demand for more ‘accurate’
racial designations and the recognition of biracial and multiracial
identities, the Fieldses remind us that there are no accurate racial
designations and no bi or multiracial identities.